What are free formats and Open Media?

Formats or codecs are the basis of all video, audio, images, text you see around. In opposition to non-free formats, free formats are royalty-free/patent-free and made available for anyone to implement and use at no cost.

Media is the content. We define Open Media as content that is both under a free format and is made available under a free license (like the less-restricitve Creative Commons licenses).

Why do free formats matter for either the Free Software, Free Culture, or Open Source movements?

Let's just say that without free formats there's really no point for any of those projects. Media is content. When it's locked in proprietary formats, you remove the freedom of the users to use it. If you believe in the ideals of any of those movements, you should not create content under proprietary formats or create tools that work with these formats only.

But I don't care about any of those movements! I'm just a normal person

Then focus on the more "practical" aspects of free formats. Most of them provide better audio or visual quality than their proprietary counter-parts. All of them are confirmed to work in the future, whereas with proprietary formats you never know what the corporation is planning. And there's no DRM. Free formats are not crippled or defective by design. They provide you with what you want: content. That's what Open Media is all about. Content.

But the pirates won't release material under free formats!

Unfortunately, piracy will always exist. More unfortunately, the rise of formats is always due to piracy: look at VHS and MP3 cases.

While we will not advocate nor condemn piracy, the problem with the warez scene is that they release material on the currently popular formats. Free formats can be popular as well as long as people work to make it so. So, while we will not advocate nor condemn piracy, we hope the warez scene will wake up and do the right thing. The warez scene believes it's doing the world a favor. Maybe they should prove that by going further and use free formats only.

However, pirated content will not get a clean legal status no matter how open and free the media format involved is. Never forget that. Magnatune and other online stores will sell you content under free formats, some of it licensed under free licenses too.

How do I edit SOM articles?

Easy. Follow the [ edit ] link at the bottom of every post. It will lead you to a wiki where you may help improve the articles.

How may I contribute content to the SOM project?

Why the acronym SOM?

Who's behind SOM?

What is this Ogg thing I keep hearing about?

Ogg is a container format. It's complex, but you don’t need to know the details. Just keep in mind that Theora is sometimes called Ogg Video and Vorbis called Ogg Audio, because they both go inside Ogg. Ogg is not just audio, okay?

You may also see some companies promoting so-called “OGG players”. There’s two problems here: Ogg is not an acronym and these companies are fooling their customers into thinking Ogg _is_ Vorbis, which is not true. So, if you see a company selling a player with support for “OGG”, it means it can play Vorbis, but very likely it won’t play any of Theora, Speex, Dirac, OggPCM, OggMNG, etc.

To avoid confusion just forget about Ogg altogether and call the formats by their appropriate name, regardless of their connection to the Ogg project.